


Your Heart's on a High

by Pyrosane



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 01:47:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7247245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyrosane/pseuds/Pyrosane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The space they share is dripping color.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Heart's on a High

**1.**

"Why," James begins, "is your hair so black?"

"Because,"and this is where Brock leaps the most difficult hurdle: "I'm not Steve."

James wakes twice a day.

There is the first awakening, upon which his eyes open, slowly for the world to adjust. It's like, Brock notices, hearing the motion of headlights in the winter when the car’s harsh canary-glows, like disembodied guillotines, are cutting their way into the snow, into the night’s cushioned earth; the noise is silent until it is no longer there.

There is, then, the second awakening, wherein the natural state of the world returns to James. As in, the colors sluggishly break into whatever bleak black and white visions James woke up to at first, much more slowly than the headlights unto the snow, much less suddenly. It's like, Brock notices, taking a pipette of iodine to blood; the colors begin to invade, filling in the whites and shrinking the blacks, until they become stains, or permanent fixtures for the day.

Anyway.

James wakes and makes no comment on the snow falling outside. Brock watches him carefully these days, makes a secret record of all the things James says these days. It’s not much, because as James remembered his middle name, Buchanan, he forgot Brock’s, and once James remembered his last name, Barnes, he forgot Brock’s, and once James remembered Steve’s face, he forgot Brock’s.

Brock is waiting for the day that James forgets him completely.

Therefore, Brock is wrong: it is not that there isn’t much to record. It is simply that Brock records much of the exact same things. In particular, “who are you?” and “why is your hair so black?” and, finally, the worst, which also happens the most: “I remember you. You’re the man who hurt me.”

**2.**

It was, by all means, difficult to tell at first whether James is recovering or regressing.

After all, there was a period of grace. How long did it last? Several days, certainly only a week at most. James remembered Steve and he continued to remember Brock, until the long stretch of past that he shared with Steve came up to swallow any sentiments James continued to harbor for Brock, like a black pond to a thrown stone. Like, like, like. Brock is slowly running out of similes and metaphors and comparisons. There had been the mouth of a sea cave to a washed up sailor and his ship’s broken parts, wide and demanding, and drowning kites for when James had difficulty stepping outside, and a midsummer carnival for James’ wild heart, for when James asked Brock to dance with him in the evenings they both felt alright.

Brock is running out of similes and metaphors and comparisons but he is still working on how to beat around the truth’s terribly thistled bush, or as Brock hates to admit, the reality that James never once stopped forgetting. That is, James was always forgetting somebody, be it Steve or Brock.

But there is the answer to Brock’s first question: was James recovering or regressing? Well. Brock supposes it largely depends on the man and the point in time - for Steve, circa post-HYDRA’s fall, James was certainly recovering, even if Steve didn’t know it yet. And Brock? Brock was stranded on the wrong side of the clock’s memory frame.

**3.**

See this: wolves hunt in packs, wolves roam large distances, and wolves are endangered.

Also: werewolves are a myth.

Luckily, Brock and James are only human. What Brock is trying to say, or think, or try not to think about is that despite their close proximity, sharing the same bed and the same kitchen and the same living room all within the same house on the same star-lit, sun-poisoned, moon-spiked edge of a Tuscan vineyard, they are speeding apart, hurtling towards opposite hands of the galaxy in the way only they could, with one man constantly forgetting and then remembering and then trying to remember and then not trying at all, and the other man breaking. One does not fall out of love so easily.

It’s too bad that one is the loneliest number.

Brock wasn’t raised by wolves but he was raised feral by a crippled system aimed at making him a criminal. It succeeded, and he became a terrorist, but he also became an unraveling man’s lover. And even though he is only human, humans, like wolves, are pack animals. Brock found his pack within the confinements of fear and bouts of loneliness, but James was Brock’s pack nonetheless. How much easier it would have been to be raised by wolves.

**4.**

Steve is a good man.

Steve is such a good man that however Brock tries to reroute the circuits of James’ uncertain hardware, James finds his way back to his golden friend, his shining friend, his _perfect_ friend. So it seems that Steve is not actually a virus to James’ bloodstream. Steve is not a condition. Steve is a part of James, of the same composition that is simply of a different body; they are twin minds, twin thoughts, one hard-headed, rough-housed Brooklyn kid from a time that Brock has only read about in textbooks that he didn’t even really read. This is something Brock cannot compete with.

Anyway, James was fixed at birth to prioritize Steve by default, and so when memories of Steve began filling up James’ head like water to a pitcher, room had to be made, so those he had of Brock had to go. After all, Brock is all but a good man, and a bad man brings naught but bad memories.

**5.**

“Why,” James begins, “is your hair so black?”

"Because,"and this is where Brock leaps the most difficult hurdle: "I'm not Steve."

Now, for a plot twist:

“I know you’re not Steve.”

“Then why?”

“Because it’s funny, Brock, how even after all of the colors have come back, you stay the same. You remain black and white.”

And Brock thinks that this is, actually, very morbid, but he doesn’t say. Instead, he tells James what James always seems to forget.

“That’s because when everything else has changed, for you, I’ll stay the same.”

At this, James is silent for a long time, as if to ponder, as if to search. And then: “Did you really think, Brock, that when I told you about colors filling in my world after I wake, I was saying that my mornings exist in gradients of monochrome?”

Brock nods. James talked about the saturations, the way an armchair could start off as black and then become blue and then even out into so many splendid shades of violet and navy. What else could James have meant by colors?

“Brock,” James says. Brock doesn’t want James to continue. “My mornings are not really gray. Not literally. Brock, I see colors, all the time, when I wake and before I go to sleep. I say that you remain black and white because you remain, Brock, in my world as a captured shadow in my past. I say that you remain black and white because you remain, Brock, with no place in my future.”

**6.**

Brock is running out of similes and metaphors and comparisons, but he finally has one that he thinks suits himself rather nicely. It’s the one he couldn’t - or wouldn’t, it doesn’t matter now anyway - come up with until James forced him to.

Here it is:

Brock is a dropped anchor, unmoving, still as the passed subjects of an old photograph.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this about a year ago, I think? Anyway, it's been a while. Here's some Rumlow/Bucky for your morbid amusement. I have no excuses.


End file.
